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The article presents responses of the author on his books published in the 1985 issue of the journal "Human Studies." He holds that both scholarly and biographically significant point behind his work A Bergsonian Bridge to Phenomenological Psychology is the following, in 1924, before starting this endeavor, sociologist Alfred Schutz had looked at sociologist Edmund Husserl's early phenomenological writings but found that they had nothing to contribute to what he had planned to do namely, to give Max Weber's sociology of understanding a pheno-psychological underpinning which, in his opinion, they needed in order not only to be made consistent but also in order to provide them with a justification deeper than that which could be provided by sociological reasoning. The author confesses that his book Phenomenology of Consciousness and Sociology of the Life-World is his favorite. He agrees with his critics who have pointed out the book does not cover, or at least does not emphasize evenly all topics which should be treated in an advanced and reasonably sophisticated introduction to the areas of its thematic concerns.

This paper applies a hybrid Heideggerian-ethnomethodological approach to physiotherapy practice. Unlike previous studies written by and for practitioners, this paper uses my personal experience receiving physical therapy as its point of departure. By combining Heidegger's [Being and time (trans: Stambaugh J). State University of New York Press, New York ] notion of the 'ontological difference' with Garfinkel's (Studies in ethnomethodology, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs ) concept of 'accountability,' I argue that in physical therapy practice, both client and practitioner actively shape the body into a coherent object for medical intervention. I begin by introducing three key phenomenological concepts, the life-world, the ontological difference, and Heidegger's critique of subjectivity. I then empirically substantiate these concepts by reviewing classic and recent studies in ethnomethodology. I conclude with my own experience of physical therapy, and demonstrate how both client and practitioner actively constitute the body as a medical and therapeutic object. This is cause for both disability studies and physiotherapy to reconsider some of their core concepts, 'medicalization' and 'client-specific measurement,' respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In considering the Cambridge School of intellectual history, we should distinguish Skinner's conventionalism from Pocock's contextualism whilst recognising that both of them argue that the study of a text's linguistic context is at least necessary and perhaps sufficient to ensure understanding. This paper suggests that although "study the linguistic context of an utterance" is a valuable heuristic maxim, it is not a prerequisite of understanding that one does so. Hence, we might shift our attention from the role of linguistic contexts in understanding a text, to the role of ideational contexts in our explanations of meanings or beliefs. The explanatory role of contexts can be unpacked in terms of traditions and dilemmas. Here the paper also considers how this approach differs from that of the Cambridge School. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that cognitive psychology's practice of explaining mental processes in terms which avoid invoking phenomenology, and the person-level self-conception with which it is associated in common sense psychology, leads to a hybrid Cartesian dual- ism. Because phenomenology is considered to be fundamentally irrelevant in any scientific explanation of the mind, the person-level is regarded as "scientifically invisible": it is a ghost-like housing for sub-personal computational cognition. The problem of explaining how the sub-personal and sub-phenomenological machinery of mind is related to person-level experience is as troublesome for cognitive psychology as the problem Descartes faced in explaining how the ghost (the non-corporeal mind) is related to the machine (the material body). This paper outlines the historical roots of cognitive dualism, showing how it has come to recapitulate a number of puzzling conceptual dichotomies that have hindered scientific and philosophical psychology since Kantian constructivism. It then defends the view that cognitive psychology's commitment to the sub-personal explanatory level leads to exaggerated deflationary claims about the explanatory significance of phenomenology, and the person- level framework. It is argued that phenomenological description must function as a constraint upon, and guide for, theory formation in cognitive psychology (as illustrated in the work of the cognitive neuro-psychologist A.R. Luria). Phenomenology must be brought into a kind of reflective equilibrium with the cognitive and neuro-sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on the relationship between Husserlian phenomenology and scientific psychology. It tries to show how phenomenological results have relevance and validity for present-thy cognitive developmental psychology by arguing that consciousness matters in the study of the representational mind. The paper presents some methodological remarks concerning empirical or applied phenomenology; it describes the conception of an exploratory developmental study with 3 to 9-year-old children viewing a complex pictorial display; it then illustrates how a phenomenological interpretation of the data works; in conclusion, it sketches a view of realism about conscious experiences which is taken to be inherent in the phenomenological perspective of understanding the representational mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the comments of the editor for the journal "Human Studies." This special issue began with an idea proposed by George Psathas over lunch an intentionally open and broad call for papers to all contributors, editors and friends of "Human Studies." The present volume displays the many different ways that call was answered. As a sociologist have generally found it advisable to reject what in traditional academic circles is called interdisciplinary but in practice seems a way for one discipline to steal, and often distort in the process, ideas from other disciplines and claim them as their own. When, for instance, sociologists make use of psychological theories to explain children, rather than displaying interdisciplinarianism, they, from perspective, simply fill in gaps neglected by sociologists by stuffing in handy ideas from psychology, doing justice to neither.

The article examines those situations in which people feel that they have either too much or too little time, situations in which the pace of life seems either too fast or too slow for comfort and in which there is a fixation on one or another personal time dimension, such as the past. Unemployment is commonly observed to show time-related problems or time-stresses related to pace and fixation. Thus it is commonly thought to present the problems of too much time, too slow a pace, with the consequent need to fill or kill time, together with the problem of fixation on the past, and an uncertain or event absent sense of the future. The paper as a whole consists of two distinct but related parts. First, it outlines a general conceptualization of time-structures and time-stresses developing the idea of people being inherently time-structures and explores the problems of time experience associated with pace and fixation. Second, it applies this analysis to a consideration of the experience of employment and unemployment, with the emphasis on the latter. It focuses on the time dimension in the various notions of human needs, dissatisfactions and stress used in a selection of studies of the psychological effects of unemployment.

The article presents information on the comments of the editor for the journal "Human Studies." This special issue began with an idea proposed by George Psathas over lunch an intentionally open and broad call for papers to all contributors, editors and friends of "Human Studies." The present volume displays the many different ways that call was answered. As a sociologist have generally found it advisable to reject what in traditional academic circles is called interdisciplinary but in practice seems a way for one discipline to steal, and often distort in the process, ideas from other disciplines and claim them as their own. When, for instance, sociologists make use of psychological theories to explain children, rather than displaying interdisciplinarianism, they, from perspective, simply fill in gaps neglected by sociologists by stuffing in handy ideas from psychology, doing justice to neither.